General

MMS Guide

Multimedia is going to be a revolutionary change as far
as subscribers are concerned but, for network operators
it is best seen as an evolutionary change. It is a natural
development and extension of the Short Message
Service (SMS) and one which will allow them to
leverage the success of the SMS business model as
they enter the broadband world of package-switched
2.5G and 3G messaging.

Like SMS, MMS is destined to attract mass-market
uptake, particularly among the young who will embrace
it enthusiastically as a pervasive and compelling tool
of social interaction and entertainment. MMS gives
users a whole new repertoire of person-to-person
communication possibilities which they can orchestrate
themselves and customise at will. As for network
operators, we believe that MMS will represent the most
important new source of revenue in the GPRS and
3G marketplace.

Messaging market evolution

The Short Message Service (SMS) has been a part of the
GSM world since 1992. It allows a maximum of 160
alphanumeric characters to be sent, person-to-person,
across low-bandwidth mobile phone networks.
Paradoxically, it is the very limitations of text messaging that has contributed to its huge and growing appeal in
the youth market, resulting in a comprehensive and
ingenious sub-language of abbreviations and characterbased
pictograms like the :) happy face and :( sad face.

With SMS, the message, once sent, is normally stored in
the operator’s SMS Centre, ready to be picked up by the
recipient when he or she next logs on. This process,
known as ‘store-and-forward’, is very low-cost for the
user because the actual transaction time is so short as
there is no need to stay on-line while the message is
being delivered by the SMS Centre.

The most recent development in SMS allows users with
the appropriate handsets to select special text effects
and transmit and receive simple pictures, sounds and
animations along with their messages. This is sometimes
referred to as Enhanced Message Service (EMS) and it
is made possible within the limitations of SMS by a
technique called concatenation, a way of linking
together a chain of several SMS messages. Although this
enhanced service exhibits some multimedia features it
still uses existing SMS technology and familiar second
generation, circuit-switched GSM networks capable of
transmission rates of a mere 9.6 kbs.

The full-blown Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS),
by contrast, will depend on 2.5G (GPRS and EDGE)
and 3G (UMTS) networks. The higher bandwidth
available, and the use of packet-switched, Internet
Protocol (IP) technology will enable a quantum leap in
transmission rates - 115 kbs in the case of 2.5G and up
to 2000 kbs in the case of 3G. This will open the way
for richer messages which may include combinations of
text, voice, animated graphics, photos, video clips,
music and so on.

Basic operating principles

The industry standards governing MMS are defined and
regulated by the industry bodies, WAP Forum and the
3G Partnership Project (3GPP). WAP, the Wireless
Application Protocol, which MMS will initially use, is
‘bearer-agnostic’ as will be its successor MexE. This
means that, within MMS, it will still be possible to use
popular existing services such as SMS but without the
frustrating limitations that have dogged them until now.
In fact, backward and forward compatibility is one of
the key attractions of MMS, overcoming the past
problems of rapid technology and handset obsolescence.
MMS operates like SMS in the sense that it is a personto-
person service with an operator-controlled central
message storage, management and relay centre which
also provides the sender with confirmation that the
message has been received. The MMS Centre (MMSC),
however, needs to be a more flexible entity than the
SMS Centre, in order to cope with the variety of
different message types and the need to convert
message formats according to the capabilities of the
receiving terminals.

The main components of MMS architecture

The industry body, 3GPP, has defined four key
functional elements of an MMSC product:

MMS Relay - the engine which transcodes and delivers messages to mobile subscribers

MMS Server - which provides the store in the store-and-forward MMS architecture

Scope of the technology

MMS enables person-to-person mobile messaging to
incorporate a mix of different media types in addition
to traditional voice and text:

Rich text - with the ability to select and manipulate fonts and perform a range of formatting options

Colour - from 16-colours to full-spectrum and including black & white and greyscale

Icons, logos and pictograms - selected from clip-art libraries or devised by the user

Sound clips - voice clips, melodies and special effects

Full music file downloads - such as MP3

Photographs - such as JPEG

Animated graphics - such as animated GIF

Video clips - such as MPEG4

These capabilities extend well beyond the realm of
mobile-to-mobile. They can involve combinations of
mobile or fixed phone, PDA (Personal Digital Assistant),
PC or fax device. The built-in intelligent transcoding
facility will ensure that the message format is optimised
for the receiving device.
MMS delivers all the utility of other messaging technologies
with the addition of mobility and with the ability to express
emotion and share experiences in a uniquely direct,
instantaneous way. It is, above all, a compelling mass
market, leisure-oriented service which will appeal, in the
main to a youthful user group. The emphasis, at least in
the early-adopter phase, will be on fun, entertainment,
experiment, sharing, creativity and personal, one-to-one
and one-to-many messaging within social groups.

Let’s look at just a few possible
application scenarios:

Next generation voicemail - by which it is now
possible to leave text, picture and even video mail.
You will even be able to modify a message and send
or forward it to several recipients.

Immediate Messaging - MMS features ‘push’
capability. That is to say, as long as the receiving
terminal is on, the message is delivered instantly
rather than having to be ‘collected’ from the server.
With the prospect of ‘always-on’ terminals, this
opens up the exciting possibilities of multimedia
‘chat’ in realtime.

Choosing how, when and where to view your
messages - Not everything has to be instant. With
MMS, users have an unprecedented range of choices
about how their mail should be managed. They can
predetermine what categories of messages are to
be delivered instantly, stored for later collection,
redirected to their PC or deleted. What’s more, they
also have dynamic control with the ability to make
ad-hoc decisions about whether to open, delete, file
or transfer messages as they arrive.

Mobile fax - using any fax machine to print out an
MMS message.

Sending multimedia postcards - A clip of holiday
video could be captured through your handset’s
integral video cam or uploaded via Bluetooth from a
standard camcorder - then combined with voice or text
messages and mailed instantly to family and friends.

One point of access for all messaging types - with a
single mailbox view of Internet, 2G, 2.5G and 3G
mobile network messages and with the ability to
manage all of them via your Personal Information
Manager (PIM).

The emphasis on fun applications is not to rule out
other, more serious communication uses, including
corporate roles which, we predict, will increase at an
accelerating rate over the next five years. For example,
the ability to transmit graphic, photographic and video
data within a mobile field force could be invaluable. As
handsets begin to incorporate integral video cams as
standard, MMS could also find important applications
among security teams, police forces and the insurance
loss-assessment industry to name just a few.

Business opportunities

Think about how best to charge for services -
Profitable MMS is not about airtime. You will need a
highly flexible billing system capable of reflecting the
value to the user of media-rich services. Charging
scales will need to encompass a combination of, for
example, subscription fees, per-view and/or pertransaction
charges, charges for data volume and,
perhaps, differential charges to take account of
downloaded content of variable value.

Explore the potential for using MMS as a channel for -
third-party content. The transcoding and reformatting
capabilities included in MMS will be an extremely
attractive feature which content providers will be
prepared to pay for.

Be sure to market the new user-oriented aspects of
MMS - like highly reliable delivery with store-andforward
and redirection features; like the rich range
of PIM facilities, including pre-set and dynamic
screening, storage and transfer; and like the ability to
manage messages of all types within one view.

Take advantage of advertising opportunities -
Operators must be careful not to alienate consumers
early on by bombarding them with advertising
messages. However, MMS does offer a fantastic
opportunity for advertisers to send multimedia
messages to the mobile handsets of consenting
subscribers. Such messages can have the added
benefit to the consumer of being location-based and
time-sensitive, facilitating one-to-one and, even more
important, ‘once-to-one’ direct marketing
opportunities. There is also the possibility of
subsidised messaging. In this case, each message
would carry a company logo, slogan or melody in
exchange for low-rate or free delivery.

Ensure your Customer Relationship Management -
solutions are up to the job - MMS will generate
unprecedented volumes of customer behaviour and
profile data which can be analysed to yield
invaluable marketing knowledge. With the right CRM
system, this will enable you to develop highly
targeted, personalised services to earn customer
loyalty, increased per-customer revenues and
reduced churn.

Position yourself to command the value chain - MMS
gives the operator exciting opportunities to occupy a
pivotal and high-visibility position in the complex
new mobile value chain.

Implementation pitfalls and how to avoid them

Avoid technology cul-de-sacs
Choose IT and network architectures which are
specifically Internet-oriented and which are
component-based. In particular, ensure that the
messaging platform handles bearers separately from
messaging types, from operations and from
management functionality. This will enable new
nodes and bearers to be added as networks evolve,
messaging traffic grows, messaging costs reduce and
interaction between different bearers, different
message types and different devices increases.

Ensure your supplier has a proven history in
system integration...
The success of MMS will depend on the integration
of MMS solutions with the Internet, Intranet and
mobile worlds.

media conversion
In an ideal MMS world all existing multimedia
formats should be capable of being managed and
forwarded in a transparent manner. As yet, however,
device manufacturers have not succeeded in
agreeing on a common set of supported formats and
this diversity is going to intensify with the advent of,
for example, Bluetooth and wideband. In the midterm,
therefore, the ability of the MMS architecture to
offer seamless media conversion to match the
receiving device, is going to be a major success factor.

Choose a technology partner with global experience
in wireless messaging across all networking
technologies and protocols
The evolution to 3G will not happen overnight. As
operators work towards 3G step by step - deploying
a mix of co-existent technologies and devices -
interconnectivity and interoperability will become an
increasingly pressing requirement.

Select a solution based wholly on open standards
and technologies
This will guarantee the ability to integrate third party
products from the Internet seamlessly.

Satisfy yourself that your chosen solution is fully
interoperable between all the networks in all
their configurations...

and that it can offer roaming, interconnect and,
above all, pre-pay capabilities

Be sure that your MMS platform vendor has proven
capability in IP-based billing solutions
Billing flexibility - based on volume, transaction,
event, duration and location, service and subscription
is essential in the MMS market. It is also vital that the
billing solution should support pre-pay.

Check that your supplier has...
- Global messaging experience and knowledge
- An open, scalable, telecom-grade solution
- Strong solution-integration capabilities
These will place you in the strongest possible
position to use MMS to open up profitable new
revenue streams.